The Malaiyaha plantation community’s vulnerability highlights how historical land dispossession and economic inequality complicate climate resilience and expose the limits of existing global climate finance mechanisms.
As COP31 opens in Antalya, Sri Lanka faces growing questions over whether global climate finance can address the losses suffered by communities that remain economically and socially vulnerable, particularly the Malaiyaha plantation community.
The climate negotiations must be viewed through the lens of climate justice, with the architecture of global climate finance coming under renewed scrutiny, according to the argument presented ahead of the talks.
Recently, Nepal secured $20 million from the UN Loss and Damage Fund following devastating glacial floods, a step described as necessary and welcome for its disaster governance. But the systemic marginalization of Sri Lanka’s Malaiyaha plantation community remains largely invisible in high-level global climate negotiations.
Disasters such as Cyclone Ditwah did not merely destroy infrastructure but also exposed the deep socioeconomic vulnerabilities of a community that has been structurally denied land rights for generations.
When historical colonial monoculture models collide with modern climate extremes, the result is chronic landslides and the collapse of livelihoods, raising a fundamental question for COP31: how should loss and damage be negotiated for communities that have historically never owned the land they are losing?
The issue also extends to the push for a Just Energy Transition and efforts to address escalating black carbon emissions in deteriorating public transport systems. The financial burden, the argument says, cannot continuously fall on the working class.
Climate finance flowing into the Global South must not become repackaged debt that pushes already fragile economies into deeper crises.
COP31 should therefore go beyond adaptation frameworks and development projects and instead be rooted in climate justice, with historical injustices, land rights and the principle of “Polluter Pays” addressed as part of the climate response.
True resilience, the argument concludes, is impossible without addressing historical injustices, securing land rights and ensuring that “Polluter Pays” becomes a binding and equitable mechanism.
